Our Souls Have Touched Each Other

Our souls have touched each other,
Two fountains from one jet;
Like children of one mother
Our leaping thoughts have met.

We were as far asunder
As green isles in the sea;
And now we ask in wonder
How that could ever be.

I dare not call thee lover
Nor any earthly name,
Though love's full cup flows over
As water quick with flame.

When two strong minds have mated
As only spirits may,
The wold shines new created
In a diviner day.

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poem by Mathilde Blind
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Haunted

Why will you haunt me unawares,
And walk into my sleep,
Pacing its shadowy thoroughfares,
Where long-dried perfume scents the airs,

While ghosts of sorrow creep,
Where on Hope's ruined altar-stairs,
With ineffectual beams,
The Moon of Memory coldly glares

Upon the land of dreams?
My yearning eyes were fain to look
Upon your hidden face;
Their love, alas! you could not brook,

But in your own you mutely took
My hand, and for a space
You wrung it till I throbbed and shook,
And woke with wildest moan

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poem by Mathilde Blind
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Only a Smile

No butterfly whose frugal fare
Is breath of heliotrope and clove,
And other trifles light as air,
Could live on less than doth my love.

That childlike smile that comes and goes
About your gracious lips and eyes,
Hath all the sweetness of the rose,
Which feeds the freckled butterflies.

I feed my love on smiles, and yet
Sometimes I ask, with tears of woe,
How had it been if we had met,
If you had met me long ago,

Before the fast, defacing years
Had made all ill that once was well?
Ah, then your smiling breeds such tears
As Tantalus may weep in hell.

poem by Mathilde Blind
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Snow or Snowdrops?

Is it snow or snowdrops' shimmer
Whitens thus the bladed grass,
With a faint aërial glimmer,--
Spring or winter, which did pass?
For the sky is dim and tender
With an evanescent light,
And the fading fields are white,
White with snow or snowdrops, under
The fair firstling stars of night.

Little robin, softly, cheerly
Piping on yon wintry bough,
Why have all the fields that pearly
Iridescence, knowest thou?
Did old Winter, grim and hoary,
Aim a parting dart at Spring
As she fled on azure wing,
Or did she with rainbow glory
In his face her snowdrops fling?

poem by Mathilde Blind
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You Make the Sunshine of my Heart

You make the sunshine of my heart
And its tempestuous shower;
Sometimes the thought of you is like
A lilac bush in flower,
Yea, honey-sweet as hives in May.
And then the pang of it will strike
My bosom with a fiery smart,
As though love's deeply planted dart
Drained all its life away.

My thoughts hum round you, Dear, like bees
About a bank of thyme,
Or round the yellow blossoms of
The heavy-scented lime.
Ah, sweeter you than honeydew,
Yet dark the ways of love,
For it has robbed my soul of peace,
And marred my life and turned heart's-ease
Into funereal rue.

poem by Mathilde Blind
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The Forest Pool

LOST amid gloom and solitude,
A pool lies hidden in the wood,
A pool the autumn rain has made
Where flowers with their fair shadows played.

Bare as a beggar's board, the trees
Stand in the water to their knees;
The birds are mute, but far away
I hear a bloodhound's sullen bay.

Blue-eyed forget-me-nots that shook,
Kissed by a little laughing brook,
Kissed too by you with lips so red,
Float in the water drowned and dead.

And dead and drowned 'mid leaves that rot,
Our angel-eyed Forget-me-not,
The love of unforgotten years,
Floats corpse-like in a pool of tears

poem by Mathilde Blind
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Why Will You Haunt Me

Why will you haunt me unawares,
And walk into my sleep,
Pacing its shadowy thoroughfares,
Where long-dried perfume scents the airs,
While ghosts of sorrow creep,
Where on Hope's ruined altar-stairs,
With ineffectual beams,
The Moon of Memory coldly glares
Upon the land of dreams?

My yearning eyes were fain to look
Upon your hidden face;
Their love, alas! you could not brook,
But in your own you mutely took
My hand, and for a space
You wrung it till I throbbed and shook,
And woke with wildest moan
And wet face channeled like a brook
With your tears or my own.

poem by Mathilde Blind
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Sometimes I Wonder

Sometimes I wonder if you guess
The deep impassioned tenderness
Which overflows my heart;
The love I never dare confess;
Yet hard, yea, harder to repress
Than tears too fain to start.

Sometimes I ponder, O my sweet,
The things I'll tell you when we meet;
But straightway at your sight
My heart's blood oozes to my feet
Like thawing waters in the heat,
Confused with too much light.

I hardly know, when you are near,
If it is love, or joy, or fear
Which fills my languid frame;
Enveloped in your atmosphere,
My dark self seems to disappear,
A moth entombed in flame.

poem by Mathilde Blind
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The Sphinx

Wanderer, behold Life's riddle writ in stone,
Fronting Eternity with lidless eyes;
Of all that is beneath the changing skies,
Immutably abiding and alone.
The handiwork of hands unseen, unknown,
When Pharaohs of immortal dynasties
Built Pyramids to brave the centuries,
Cheating Annihilation of her own.

The heart grows hushed before it. Nay, methinks
That Man, and all on which Man wastes his breath,
The World, and all the World inheriteth,
With infinite, inexorable links
Grappling the soul; that love, hate, birth and death
Dwindle to nothingness before thee--Sphinx.

poem by Mathilde Blind
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Lines

THOU camest with the coming Spring!
With swallows, and the murmuring
Of unloosed waters, with the birth
Of daisies dimpling the green earth.

And when the perfect rose of June
Responded to the golden noon,
My heart's deep core, suffused with bliss,
Broke into flower beneath thy kiss.

But now the swallows seaward fly,
The winds in chorus wail, 'Good-bye!'
The dead leaves whirl, and like a leaf
My heart shakes on the gusts of grief.

And yet awhile earth's flowerless breast
In lethal folds of snow will rest;
On thee too heart, with all thy woe,
Death falls one day like falling snow.

poem by Mathilde Blind
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